American democracy is
marred by low levels of participation. Poor and poorly educated people are
especially unlikely to vote, which means that powerful officials can safely
ignore their interests. Meanwhile, even citizens who do vote,
join political associations, and give money to political causes often cannot
find satisfying ways to participate.

A large literature now suggests that the
Internet is a cure for these ills. As Tracy Westen writes, “To the extent that
democracy needs saving, the new generation of interactive digital
communications technologies [has] arrived—just in time to help” (Westen 1998,
56).

Enthusiasts believe that computer networks
will make various forms of political participation more convenient, thus
increasing participation. For example, we will be able to vote from home or
make financial contributions with the click of a mouse. At the same time,
information will be readily available, so citizens will possess the knowledge
they need to participate effectively. Faced with an informed and powerful
citizenry, various elites will grudgingly allow more public participation.
Among other innovations, we may see frequent on-line referenda. Citizens may
deliberate en masse, creating a kind of ongoing national town meeting. As a
result, some argue, the public will make wise decisions without much need for
mediating institutions such as newspapers, legislatures, parties—maybe even
governments.

In
essence, some political thinkers suggest the Internet will give citizens
greater control over the decisions that governments have traditionally made.
Howard Rheingold, an early and influential observer, calls the Internet “the
great equalizer,” because it changes “the balance of power between citizens and
power barons” (quoted in Bimber 1998, 138). Computer networks may even render
legislatures, constitutional courts, and other governmental bodies irrelevant,
permitting direct rule

[p. 122 starts here]

by “the
people.” Lawrence Grossman puts the case forcefully when he writes:

Today’s
telecommunications technology may make it possible for our political system to
return to the roots of Western democracy as it was practiced in the city-states
of ancient Greece. Tomorrow’s telecommunications technology almost certainly will.... The
electronic republic cannot be as intimate or as deliberative as the
face-to-face discussions and showing of hands in the ancient Athenians’
open-air assemblies. But it is likely to extend government decision making from
the few in the center of power to the many on the outside who may wish to
participate. (Grossman 1996, 33, 49)

Many
analysts have criticized such predictions by invoking the “digital divide.”
They demonstrate that disadvantaged people are much less likely than privileged
ones to use the Internet—especially from home, where citizens can most easily
participate in politics. Income, education, race, and disability all have
strong, independent effects on the likelihood that Americans use the Internet.
Although more disadvantaged people are going online each year, the divide
remains large. For example, in 2000, 41.5 percent of American households were
connected to the Internet, but the rate was half that among single-parent
African American families in central cities. Only about a fifth of disabled
citizens were using the Internet (U.S. Census Bureau 2000b, xv, 6, xvi).

The digital divide is obviously an important
issue, but I want to go beyond it in this chapter. Even if all citizens could
use the Internet from home, computer networks would still not improve our
democracy by giving citizens more or better control over decisions
traditionally made by governments. However, the Internet does have a different
kind of democratic potential if we handle it right. In this chapter, I first
criticize the main assumptions of the standard optimistic view, and then offer
an alternative.

MYTH #1:
CONVENIENCE IS THE KEY TO PARTICIPATION

According to the Census Bureau, “Of
the 40 million people who reported that they registered, but did not vote in
the 1998 election, about one-third reported that they did not vote because they
were too busy or had conflicting work or school schedules” (U.S. Census
2000a,11). This statistic implies that turnout would increase if citizens did
not have to travel to a polling place during limited hours on Election Day.
Likewise, Robert Putnam notes that “I don’t have enough time”
is the most common reason Americans give for not volunteering in their
communities (Putnam 2000, 189).

Clearly, the Internet can make political
and civic participation more convenient and less time-consuming by bringing
certain activities right into

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people’s homes. An
organization called Hands On Atlanta provides “flexible
volunteer opportunities” for people who simply enter information about their
interests and availability on a Web page. And citizens who were excited by
Senator John McCain’s 2000 Republican Primary
victory in New
Hampshire were able
to contribute money through his Web page; he raised $10,000 per hour online
before the South
Carolina primary (Fose2000).

But it is important not to exaggerate the value of
convenience. For instance, making a political contribution has never been
difficult for people who have the money to give; the barrier for most of us is
financial. Besides, John McCain did not win the South Carolinaprimary because the Internet allowed
him to collect contributions quickly; he was still out-spent and defeated.

Likewise, a lack of time is not a
major reason for the decline in our civic connectedness. The busiest people are
generally the most avid volunteers. People who feel tied to their communities
have always found opportunities—and incurred obligations—to volunteer locally.
But these ties have diminished, and most categories of Americans (including
retirees and other non-workers) are now less involved in their communities than
they used to be (Putnam 2000, 191, 203). Therefore, reducing the time it
takes people to identify volunteer opportunities is unlikely to raise the level
of participation by much. Building social and emotional connections to
communities is more important. And here the Internet may have just the opposite
effect by insulating us from the kinds of people whom we could serve
face-to-face.

Finally, what keeps citizens from
voting is not the inconvenience of casting a ballot. Even if we allowed
citizens to vote instantaneously from home, most would not be able to choose a
candidate, either because they would lack relevant knowledge or because the
choices would be unappealing (DelliCarpini and Keeter1996). However, it is
relatively easy for people with high social status to obtain political
information, because they already read the newspaper for business and
entertainment purposes and attend meetings at which politics is discussed.
Also, the leading candidates tend to cater to their interests. Therefore,
voting correlates with income and educational levels (Rosenstone
and Hansen 1993, 14).

The group that the Census Bureau identifiedregistered
voters who said that they did not vote because they were “too busy”amounted
to just 15.25 percent of adults. This group was more male, better educated,
and more white than other registered nonvoters. (They
were even more privileged compared to non-registered adults.) Thus allowing
them to vote from home might raise turnout a bit, but it would also increase
the proportion of voters who were wealthy, college-educated, white men.

If knowledge is an
important resource whose scarcity keeps people from participating, then it
follows that as we increase the intellectual demands on voters, we will see
lower turnout—especially from those who

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do not have much money or education. Thus a system of
frequent referenda is likely to produce much lower turnout than one in which
citizens are asked to make occasional decisions about the general direction for
their community. Participants in on-line referenda will be a privileged
minority, even if everyone has Internet access at home. And this
governing elite, unlike today’s elected representatives, will have no
obligation to deliberate before they make decisions.

MYTH #2: WE NEED MORE INFORMATION

The last section suggests that more people would participate
in politics and civic life if they had better access to information. If this
theory is right, then the Internet might boost participation by providing free
and accessible information. Access to the Internet might even facilitate more
direct democracy. Citizens could prepare themselves to participate in referenda
by “surfing” the World Wide Web to gather relevant facts.

Indeed, the Internet now puts more information in people’s
homes than ever before, but this is just a continuation of long-term trends
that have brought data increasingly within everyone’s reach. Throughout the
20th century, educational levels climbed upward; thousands of libraries,
bookstores, and colleges were built; and millions of books and periodicals were
written and read. Yet there was no payoff in political participation. Indeed,
turnout declined from about two-thirds of the adult population in the 1950s and
1960s (when most African Americans still could not vote) to less than half by
the end of the century (Bimber 1998, 140-41).

We do need information before we can vote or take other
political action. We need to know which positions to adopt and which candidates
and organizations come the closest to supporting our
views. Such information is available on the Internet (although it is mixed up
with much misinformation that requires skill to detect). However, facts are not
scarce. Long before we had personal computers in our homes, there was already
far too much information at the local library and newsstand for us to process.

Thus we ought to ask: What makes people interested enough in
complex issues that they gather facts and try to interpret and apply what they
learn? In other words, what makes citizens turn available information into
applied knowledge? If you think of yourself as an individual trying to pursue
personal goals through political action, then it is not worth your time to
collect enough information to vote. Moreover, you will not have enough
conscious or definable interests to give you a personal stake in most of the
issues that the government considers important, so your con-

[p. 125 starts here]

scious self-interest will not guide
your voting. And no one will make a personalized appeal to persuade you to
participate, because you are just 1 of 100 million voters.

The whole situation changes if you are an avid member of a
group. Whether it is a political organization, an ethnic association, a sports
league, or a gardening club, its welfare will sooner or later be affected by
government decisions. If it has many members, then they may see a clear effect
from lobbying, protesting, and voting together. When the members convene, they
may persuade one another about political issues and convince one another to
participate. Statistics show that group members are much better informed about
politics, more likely to have been asked to vote, and more likely to discuss
issues than nonmembers (even comparing people of the same educational and
economic background: see Levine 2000, 93-94 for
more detail). Because of a group’s clout, politicians and other important
officials will appeal to its membership for support. This
matters because people who are asked to participate in politics often
comply, but most people are never asked (Verba et al.
1995, 135, 150). Above all, group
members often feel a “we-ness” that gives them a clear sense of interests,
ideals, and obligations, compared to what they would feel as individuals.

If group membership is the key to political participation,
then the Internet may provide billions of Web pages full of data without
raising the turnout rate by one person. The relevant question will be: What
kinds of groups and collective activities does the Internet promote? People who
participate in typical on-line activities (such as email among friends, chat
rooms, game-playing, and file-sharing) sometimes initiate political discussions
and organize political actions. However, the participants tend to be
distributed across jurisdictions, which makes
political organizing difficult. Also, it is a simple matter to exit an on-line
forum when the talk unexpectedly turns political, whereas one cannot easily
walk away from a card table or march out of a union hall. So there may be less
pressure to think about politics on the Internet than there is in traditional
associations.

A parallel argument can be made
against those who think that a lack of information is what causes Americans to
vote unwisely.
Robert McChesney, for instance, believes
that his fellow citizens would support more progressive policies if only they
understood how badly corporations misbehave. Unfortunately, citizens are denied
the information they need by the few powerful media companies that determine
what news gets through to the public. “Long-term issues, like racism or
suburban sprawl, tend to fall by the wayside,” McChesney
thinks, while the media “tend to accept the elite position as revealed truth”
on matters such as “the innate right of the United States to invade another
country or the equation of private property

[p. 126 starts here]

and the
pursuit of profit with democracy” (McChesney 1999,
50). McChesney argues that the Internet would have a
progressive influence, except that it is being dominated by the same companies
that control traditional media.

I read
the mainstream, commercial press, and I see articles almost every day about the
very issues that McChesney thinks are overlooked. journalists actually cover some “progressive” issues more
than many of their readers would like them to; for instance, most whites
apparently think that “too much attention” is paid to “race and racial issues”
(Morin 2001). And more information is available about the misbehavior of
corporations than one could read in a lifetime. So mass-media corporations are
not preventing us from acquiring facts. The problems are (1) a lack of
persuasive arguments for progressive
positions, and (2) a dearth of large and effective organizations that can
motivate people to act against corporate interests.

MYTH #3: THE INTERNET IS A MASSIVE TOWN MEETING

Perhaps
the democratic promise of the Internet lies not in its vast array of facts, but
in its many egalitarian discussions of
public issues. By talking on-line, citizens may acquire the motivation,
knowledge, and even the wisdom they need to participate in politics. Indeed,
deliberation is an essential element of any democracy. When discussions go
well, citizens encounter alternative perspectives, articulate their goals and
priorities in ways that appeal to others, sharpen their sense of realistic
options and necessary trade-offs, abandon support for indefensible positions,
and develop mutual respect that allows them to coexist and cooperate even when
they disagree.

A great
deal of deliberation can be found on the Internet. However, Marshall van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson
have drawn attention to an important problem. They argue that if most people
want to expose themselves to diverse views, then the Internet is a wonderful
tool because it makes an almost infinite range of ideas and perspectives
available. But if people want—and are able to find—material that is tailored to
their own initial values and interests, then they will naturally “balkanize,”
creating many separate communities or conversations that are not in mutual
contact. The Internet encourages balkanization, because it increases the
universe of available material and also provides efficient tools for selection,
such as search engines and filters (Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson 1997).

Van Alstyne
and Brynjolfsson do not argue that people actually
prefer to see only a narrow range of material. They note that if we are
generalists with a taste for diversity, then the Internet will promote
deliberation. According to a survey taken in 2000, 67 percent of Americans
considered

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it important to obtain “general news that
gives you general information about important events that are happening,”
whereas just 28 percent preferred to see “news that is mostly about your
interests and what’s important to you.” These statistics suggest that most of
us at least understand the value of a broad outlook. However, citizens may
satisfy their desire for general news by glancing at headlines, while actually
deliberating about much narrower issues. Besides, the same survey found that
young people, men, and poorly educated people were relatively unlikely to care
about general news, which implies that these groups may opt out of public
deliberations (Pew Research Center 2000).

More
generally, the trend in American culture is away from diverse, multipurpose
organizations (such as unions, national churches, and strong geographical
communities), toward single-interest associations with narrow niches. Dennis
Thompson says that he has scanned the Internet and found: “Hikers to Free our Parks, National Whistleblower Union, Citizens
against Daylight Savings Time, Citizens for Finnish-American Power, the U.S. Committee
to Support the Revolution in Peru, and
the Anarchists Anti-Defamation League” (Thompson 1999, 37). But as Andrew Shapiro
notes, “you’d be hard pressed” to find a group “committed to the General Common
Good” (1999, 113).

Meanwhile,
the Internet provides few effective ways for people to put their case to others
who are not initially disposed to listen. Shapiro argues that Web users are
unlike visitors to a physical space, because they do “not have to hear the
civil rights marcher, take a leaflet from the striking worker, or see the
unwashed homeless person. Their world [can] be cleansed of all interactions
save those they explicitly [choose]” (1999, 136). A similar logic suggests that the
Internet may increase intellectual stratification as experts are able to talk
only among themselves and ignore the rest of the public.

Cass Sunstein,
a political and legal theorist who has done much to advance our understanding
of deliberation, summarizes the disadvantages of balkanization in his book Republic.com (2001). Among other
problems, balkanized groups tend to move toward the views of their own most
radical members. Members of such groups do not understand other perspectives or
learn how to relate to people who are different. Not realizing that some
thoughtful citizens disagree with them, they assume that the government is
corrupt when it takes contrary positions. And they constantly reinforce their
own beliefs—even completely false ones—without ever being challenged. For
instance, many people who are opposed to gun control have encountered the
following quotation more than once online: “This year will go down in history!
For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets
will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead
into the future!” On numerous Web sites, this quote is

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attributed to Adolf Hitler, who is supposed to have extolled gun control
in the Berlin
Daily on April
15, 1935 (Page 3 Article 2). Everything about this alleged statement
is false, including the implication that the Nazi government imposed gun
control. But only Second Amendment purists are likely to encounter it, and
their faith is never challenged (for a small sample of this, see www.urbanlegends.com/politics/hitlerguncontrol.html).

MYTH #4: DEMOCRACY WILL FLOURISH WHEN THE “POWER
BROKERS” ARE GONE

What
Andrew Shapiro calls the “Control Revolution” implies, among other things, a
shift of power away from the leaders of formal organizations and toward
individuals who have computers on their desks. As Grossman writes, “The big
losers ... are the traditional institutions that have served as the main
intermediaries between government and its citizens—the political parties, labor
unions, civic associations, even the commentators and correspondents in the
mainstream press” (Grossman 1996, 16).

The
Control Revolution implies some advantages for democracy, because even highly
democratic organizations usually concentrate power in their professional
staffs, steering committees, and elected leaders. In other words, they reflect
Robert Michels’s “iron law of oligarchy” (1915). In
the 1960s, proponents of participatory democracy looked for
alternative models that were more voluntary, individualistic, consensual,
loose, and egalitarian than traditional parties and interest groups. Jane Mansbridge has analyzed the “unwritten rules” that governed
these “free schools, food co-ops, law communes, women’s centers, hotlines, and
health clinics.” Their norms included “face-to-face, consensual decision making
and the elimination of all internal distinctions that could encourage or
legitimate authority” (1983, vii, 21). College towns, especially along the PacificCoast, were
hotbeds for such experimentation. The same communities then played a crucial
role in the development of personal computers and networks. Manuel Castells argues that the global, postindustrial “network
society” arose in part out of “a sprawling computer counterculture” that was
one of the “aftershocks of the 1960s’ movements in their most
libertarian/utopian version.” “If the first industrial revolution was British,”
Castells writes, “the first information technology
revolution was American, with a Californian inclination” (2000, I, 49, 61). It
embodied the spirit of Berkeley, California, circa
1968.

The Internet contributes to the
general crisis of authority that has weakened traditional leaders, from
politicians to clergy people and educators (Poster 1995). For example,
membership organizations can now perform many of their functions (such as
meetings, elections, fund-raising, and

[p. 129 starts here]

publishing) online,
which means that their members can leave with the click of a mouse and find
other groups that are less restrictive. Heads of organizations must therefore
avoid imposing rules and dues on their members, whenever possible. The Internet
also spells trouble for newspaper publishers and editors, who once exercised a
lot of control over the content of the news; now citizens can search for any
combination of stories they want. And computer networks undermine the authority
of religious leaders, because individuals can search the Web for religious
thoughts that appeal to them—any time of the day or night (Brinton
2001).

Finally, the World Wide Web further
undercuts our already weak political parties, because now anyone can cheaply
produce the on-line equivalent of a campaign flyer. The operator of
www.voterepublican.net, for example, is a completely independent citizen who
says, “If my site was run by the Republican National Committee, they’d be
saying, ‘Do this’ or, ‘Don’t say that.’ I wanted to be
involved promoting Republican conservatives. But I didn’t have time to get
involved with the parties” (quoted in Wayne 2000). His site could potentially
be as popular as the official www.rnc.org, yet the party would have no control
over its content. A Web page could even be devoted to lambasting the party that
it ostensibly supported. The publisher of a liberal feminist political site
based in Texas predicts that “these sites will increase democracy in the
long run,” because “you don’t have tightly scripted campaigns as the sole
voice. You will have independent citizens voicing their opinions in a way they
couldn’t before” (Wayne 2000).

The “power brokers” are indeed in trouble, but before we jump
to the conclusion that their demise will be good for democracy, we should
consider a few problems. First, corporate managers are not threatened in the same
way that the leaders of unions, parties, religious bodies, and newspapers are.
There is a lot of chatter about companies’ new enthusiasm for decentralization
and “empowered” employees (Nye in Kamarck and Nye 1999, 9-10). To some extent, there has been a real shift of authority in
the workplace, thanks to the increased bargaining power of highly skilled
workers in the “knowledge economy.” However, the people who clean bathrooms and
prepare chickens still work at the bottom of powerful hierarchies. For them,
the decline of unions and parties is a loss, not a gain. Besides, to a
considerable extent, companies are simply using new strategies to maximize
profits. When their employees’ interests conflict with their bottom line, top
managers will make the ultimate decisions (which means
that they really retain power).

Second, strong,
organized nonprofit organizations would be missed if they disappeared from
civil society, because they provide avenues for upward mobility. In the past,
some rank-and-file industrial workers acquired real power by rising to union
leadership positions. Some Catholic

[p. 130 starts here]

immigrant boys gained political influence by becoming bishops or
cardinals. And quite a few people climbed out of poverty into political office with
the assistance of parties. None of these paths to power was ever easy or fair,
but at least there were many of them. In a society with only one category of
powerful leaders—business executives—most people will have no hope of acquiring
authority.

Third, citizens
benefit from disciplined organizations that impose rules and make demands.
Loose, voluntary groups cannot overcome pervasive collective-action problems
that are especially damaging to disadvantaged citizens. For instance, poor
individuals often do not give money to support political causes, because they
reasonably believe that most of their neighbors will not contribute, and
therefore their own donations would make no difference. But a powerful,
disciplined organization such as a church or a civil rights organization can
impose dues and use the money for political action. Similarly, an individual
worker cannot force her company to raise wages, but a union can—precisely because
it can compel all its members to stop working once it has called a strike
(Levine 2001b).

Finally, voting and
other forms of democratic participation depend on exactly the kind of
organizations that Howard Rheingold and others think will be rendered obsolete
by the Internet: ethnic and fraternal organizations, unions, activist churches,
and political parties. Steven Rosenstone and John
Mark Hansen have convincingly attributed more than half of the decline in voter
turnout to a decrease in “mobilization,” by which they mean the kind of
persuading and organizing work that these organizations perform (1993, 31).

THE INTERNET AS A COMMONS

So far, I have raised doubts about
the thesis that the Internet will give citizens more or better power over their
government. These doubts should not discourage anyone from experimenting with
on-line deliberation or political organizing, but I believe that they will be
swimming against the tide. On the other hand, no one today believes that a
democratic government (whether direct or representative) should monopolize
power. Private organizations and individuals ought to be free to pursue their
own diverse interests. Besides, it is possible to generate free public goods
and resources without relying on the state. There is a word for a system of
social organization that does not rely on competition and private ownership, nor on laws and taxes. Such an organization is a “commons.”

A classic example is a field of grass, either outside a
medieval village or in the center of a New England town, on which every citizen is
entitled to graze privately owned cattle (Ostrom
1990; Taylor 1987). Although this

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kind of commons benefits a
market economy, the land itself is held as public property and never sold.
Moreover, in a classic commons, laws and governments are remote; most
management is handled by the participants themselves. Thus a commons is
attractive—at least at face value—because it avoids both competition and
coercion while encouraging broad participation. It gives people opportunities
to perform the very satisfying kind of “public work” that comes from producing
a good that is available to all (Boyte and Kari
1996).

Unfortunately, well-known problems beset any traditional
commons. On a public field that is open for grazing, each person may be tempted
to put more cattle than the pasture can bear if everyone acts the same way.
Although they are all harmed by the consequent deterioration of their shared
property, as individuals they gain more from the free fodder than they lose as
the field goes slowly to ruin. One person might be distressed by the state of
the commons and consider limiting her own use of it. But even if she decides
not to put her cow on the field, the grass will still turn to mud because of
other people’s overuse, and she will have passed up free food. Since everyone
faces the same dilemma, the pasture is doomed.

This “Tragedy of the Commons,” as Garrett Hardin called it,
seems to imply that any valuable asset must be managed either by enforcing
strict laws (the governmental approach) or by dividing the good among property
holders who have incentives to preserve their private shares (the market
approach) (Hardin 1968). The idea of a pure commons is said to be naive. But
the Internet and other new electronic media have an unusual capacity to
overcome collective-action problems (Barbook 1998; Moglen 1999). For one thing, “overgrazing” is much less
likely when an asset is digitized. If I put a document or computer code on the
Internet, it does not matter how many other people copy it for their own use;
the file remains unharmed and ready for countless more appropriations.
Consequently, I have much less reason to worry about other people’s selfish
behavior (the “free-rider” problem) than I would in a classic commons.

Another
typical barrier to maintaining a commons is simply finding and coordinating a
large enough cadre of volunteers to provide the hard,
skilled labor that is always necessary. Again, this problem is mitigated by the
Internet. For one thing, we are relatively likely to volunteer if selfish
behavior cannot ruin our work. So, for example, certain programmers spend a lot
of time improving the technical details of HTML, the free language for
designing Web pages, without worrying that HTML may be destroyed through
overuse. More importantly, the Internet makes communications cheap and
efficient, thereby allowing just a few enthusiasts out of the world’s six
billion people to identify one another and to collaborate at low cost. An
enormous amount of invaluable labor has thus been donated by programmers who
have designed the protocols, computer languages,

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and norms that govern
email, file-sharing, the design of Web pages, and most of the basic functions
of the Internet. Efforts to explain why these people are willing to bear so
many free-riders miss the point; the volunteers are rare (and often eccentric)
exceptions to normal human behavior. But it only takes a tiny percentage of the
population to keep the electronic commons going.

So consider the
Internet circa 1993. Beneath the sight of most users, computers exchanged
information using protocols that were no one’s intellectual property. Each
computer or length of wire belonged to someone, but the system had been
designed to be “interoperable,” meaning that equipment could easily be
substituted and messages could travel freely across the whole network. If
someone tried to block a packet of data or charge for its passage, it would
automatically find a different route.

At a more visible level, most people used free software for
sending email, transferring files, and browsing the Web. The code for these
programs was disclosed (“open source”) and subject to improvement by anyone.
Meanwhile, most Web sites, discussion forums, and emails were contributions of
free material, ranging in value from pirated pornography to original research,
art, and literature. There was widespread copying of good ideas for Web-page
designs and discussion groups. Imitation was easy because Web pages were
literally open-source documents that used accessible and replicable code.

Thus, the Internet was open in much the same way that the Boston
Commons is accessible to the whole community, and it was full of resources (from
the data on Web pages to the protocols governing email) that could be used by
anyone at no cost. In these respects, it was quite close to a large-scale
commons.

Two caveats
are in order. First, the cyber-commons was never pure. Governments,
universities, and industries had contributed to its development and continued
to own and manage its elements. Nonetheless, market and state institutions
coexisted with a powerful set of resources that were unowned
and available to all. Second, a commons is not necessarily democratic: indeed,
the two most famous examples came from medieval England and puritan New England,
neither of which gave the vote to all citizens. A commons can even threaten democracy
by undermining the public’s ability to regulate the social world. Compare the
traditional telephone network (which was centralized, corporate, and
proprietary) with the email system (which is a good example of a commons). The
telephone network is often described as undemocratic, because tremendous power
belonged to the people who owned the lines and switches. They had the capacity
to eavesdrop on any conversation or even to cut off citizens for speaking in a
way they disliked. However, the American telephone network was also eminently regulable, being owned by a few companies that

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were clearly subject to U.S. law. Therefore, when Congress and the federal courts created
rights to privacy and nondiscrimination, these rights were enforced. Often, the
mere threat of public opposition caused telephone companies to act in
acceptable ways. By contrast, the government would have difficulty guaranteeing
the privacy of emails, because no one can be held responsible for the passage
of an electronic data-package across switches and lines that belong to hundreds
of separate parties in several countries.

Nevertheless, a commons can serve some of the same values as a
democracy: especially equality, participation, and freedom. And within a
democratic society, a commons can provide resources (such as skills,
information, and social networks) for disadvantaged citizens. It seems at least
plausible that voluntary, collaborative work on the Internet teaches skills and
habits that potentially transfer to politics. Thus a cyber-commons could
perform some of the crucial democratic tasks that were traditionally handled by
formal organizations. In his day, Alexis de Tocqueville attributed the vitality
of our democracy to citizens’ work in building the 19th-century “commons”:
free, local, public assets such as hospitals, churches, parks, seminaries, and
schools (Tocqueville 1954, II, 114). Today the Internet is a promising venue
for such public work.

Consider, for example, work that young Hmong
and Latino people are doing today in St. Paul, Minnesota, as part of a project
organized by the Jane Adams School for Democracy. They are building a database
of the community’s “learning resources”: everything from formal classes at the
high school to an elderly Mexican immigrant in a retirement home who is willing
to teach traditional Indian medicine. Soon citizens will be able to visit a
computer in the public library, enter a word that describes their interests,
and see the local learning resources displayed on a map. The information on the
map will be a free public good. The process of gathering information is already
building local trust, skills, and networks. And because the map is stored in
digital form, it can be widely disseminated at low cost; therefore, the project
is not heavily reliant on support from formal organizations or the government.
The participants justly claim that they are building a “St. Paul Information
Commons;” and their work has considerable democratic potential (Levine 2001b).

THE COMMONS UNDER THREAT

The English
medieval commons gradually vanished as the lord of each manor asserted property
rights and evicted the peasants so that he could graze his sheep for profit.
There is often money to be made from privatizing a common resource—if one can
get away with it. Following this

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pattern, much of the global
Internet commons has been privatized since the early 1990s. For instance, many
people looked at early Web pages by using Mosaic, which was free, open-source
software. But the Netscape Corporation borrowed Mosaic’s technology, developed
a new version that was incompatible with it, and copyrighted its version as
Navigator (Bollier 2001, 51-52). Now most people
browse the Internet using such proprietary software.

On a much wider scale, MicrosoftTM
has adopted a policy of “embrace, extend, and extinguish” toward open-source
software. The company adopts free and publicly accessible programs, adds
wrinkles that allow it to copyright a new version of the program, and then
makes only the copyrighted version compatible with its other products, such as
Windows. It has used this strategy to undermine HTML; Java, the versatile
programming language; and multimedia applications such as RealAudio and
QuickTime (Bollier 2001, 52).

Although the Justice Department sued MicrosoftTM
partly for this reason, the federal government has sometimes abetted the new
enclosure movement. An example is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998,
which prohibits copying information that is protected by a technological
measure, even if individuals have a right to see that information. For
instance, citizens are allowed (under the fair use doctrine) to broadcast
snippets of music or film for critical purposes. But making a good copy of a
movie from a digital video disk (DVD) would require defeating technological
barriers, and this has become a criminal act. Copying part of a movie and
inserting it into another film—even for a school project, even for the purposes
of parody—is illegal (Benkler 2000, 571).
Furthermore, people can now be prosecuted for making or selling products or
services that are used to circumvent technological protections, even if the
devices in question are used to view (and not to copy) material that people
have a right to see. At least one person is in jail for designing software that
could be used to commit copyright violation (Lessig
2001).

Meanwhile, private companies have won patents for Internet business
methods (for instance, Amazon.com’s “1-click” method
of paying for products), which means that the “look and feel” of their sites
has become private property that cannot be copied (Bollier
2001, 58). Companies are also trying to control the Internet more broadly by
steering people to their own Web sites and by preventing certain kinds of
hostile sites from attracting audiences. When a citizen searches for “McDonaldSTM,” the McDonaldSTM
Company wants to make sure that she only finds its site—not pictures of a
family with the same name or (worse) a vegetarian, pro-labor, or anti-American
site that might use the word “McDonald’ST”‘“ in its
text, its links, or its domain name. When companies sue outsiders for using
their trademarks in Web pages, they sometimes lose on First

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Amendment grounds. But corporations tend to
prevail before the non-governmental organization that distributes domain names,
ICANN, which decides who should have the most desirable addresses. Moreover,
companies are able to purchase favorable treatment from many of the leading
search engines (Cohen 2001, 18-23).

The
enclosure of the commons is troubling because it means that ordinary people
cannot collaborate to produce public goods online without running afoul of
property claims. Too much of the Internet is now being managed by companies
that pursue their own economic interests that are not publicly accountable.
Constitutional values are undermined, because almost no part of the Internet
now qualifies as a “public space” in which free speech would enjoy the
strongest protection (see Cohen 2001). People who use private Internet service
providers and MicrosoftT”‘ Explorer
to look at corporate Web pages are visiting private property in which their
constitutional rights are limited.

Unless
we intervene forcefully at this stage, it is likely that most people will use
the Internet in the following way within a few years. They will receive
high-speed video and email service from a massive corporation such as AOL Time
Warner or Microsoft’’ that also has holdings in various entertainment and news
companies. This corporation will require them to go on-line through some kind
of portal with a proprietary search engine and a few prominent links. Both the
links and the search engine will direct customers, whenever possible, to sites
owned by the Internet service provider. Most of this material will be slick,
multimedia programming created by paid professionals for large audiences—without
the participation of ordinary citizens. Since there will be some competition
among service providers, they may decide that they should permit customers to
view low-budget, free material as well. But they will do their best to downplay
such offerings, since only their own sites will generate advertising and sales
revenue. According to the Center for Digital Democracy, the top four “digital
media properties (AOL Time Warner, MicrosoftT”‘,
Yahoo, and Lycos) ... attract more visitors than the next 14 combined. And the
top 10 companies (which include NBC, DisneyTm, and
Amazon) attract more visitors than the rest of the top 50 combined. The traffic
patterns of today’s Web, in other words, are much closer to those of network
television in the 1960s than to those of the Internet in the early 1990s”
(Chester 2001).

Under these conditions, citizens
who try to operate their own sites for democratic purposes will become
increasingly discouraged, since few visitors will be able to find their work
and will be legally barred from using the patented production techniques
employed on commercial sites. Thus the Internet will begin to look like the
next generation of cable television instead of a decentralized, participatory
medium. Most nonprofit sites will be as marginal as public-access television
stations today.

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BUILDING THE COMMONS

Preventing this calamity requires
three important steps. First, the federal government must impose statutes and
regulations to preserve the openness of the Internet. How best to achieve that
goal is a complex matter beyond the scope of this chapter, but some promising
strategies include:

preventing Internet service providers from discriminating
among Web sites and search engines and not allowing them to impose any
particular portal or software on their customers;

separating Internet service providers from the producers
of news, information, and entertainment;

requiring MicrosoftTM (and any
other software company that attains monopolistic control of a particular
field) to publish its software in a form readable by human beings so that
it can be imitated and modified within the limits of intellectual property
law;

reducing the scope of intellectual property, especially
companies’ ability to patent software and business methods;
and

·making
federal grants to support the development of open-source software, public
protocols, and noncommercial search engines.

As long as the federal government
uses traditional antitrust arguments to regulate companies such as MicrosoftTM, its interventions will probably be too
moderate. The main problem is not the potential of monopolies to lower the
quality and raise the cost of consumer goods. The main issue is that our
democracy requires a commons to release the civic energy of its citizens.

Meanwhile, the government and
foundations must support the creation of attractive, exciting, free material
that can be disseminated online. Documents, data, and images can be produced at
low cost, but the really valuable ingredients of the cyber-commons would
include whole libraries and museums translated into digital form,
information-rich maps, massive databases (e.g., of pollution statistics or
candidate profiles), and exciting multimedia presentations. Such offerings are
expensive, and if their owners pass the costs on to consumers, then many people
will not be able to afford access. In their Digital Promise report, Lawrence Grossman and Newton
Minow recommend auctioning the broadcast spectrum to
generate revenues that would fund free on-line material (Grossman and Minow 2001).

Third, we need networks of human beings who are committed to
the idea of a commons and who can share skills, experience, and even software.
The young people who are building the St. Paul Information Commons are working
more or less alone, so they must invent all their own

[p. 137 starts here]

models and
strategies. If they belonged to a broader movement, then they would benefit
from many economies of scale—not to mention mutual support and encouragement.
Indeed, networks have begun to grow up among groups that maintain nonprofit
community portals and that try to use the Internet to build civic bonds. But it
would be beneficial to broaden these networks and to bring them together into
one fairly cohesive force devoted to commons-style work. That is the purpose of
a new institution, the Public Telecommunications Service, an organization that
I am presently helping to form.

Today
there is no groundswell of popular support for legislation or regulation that
would support the commons. As long as issues such as software patents pit a
small cadre of Washington-based activists against industry lobbyists and
lawyers, the latter will always win. But citizens who actually use the Internet
for civic purposes will sooner or later encounter concrete, practical problems
that will motivate them to support appropriate reforms. For instance,
volunteers who try to map the assets of their communities can initially manage
perfectly well using the hardware and software of today’s Internet. But when
they try to build larger and more elaborate projects, they will find that
commercial search engines do not lead people to their sites and that privacy
concerns keep residents from listing themselves as “community assets.”
Volunteers will not be able to afford to advertise or to buy the necessary
equipment to serve a larger audience. They may even find themselves in
competition with companies that offer databases of “community assets” without
including a full range of informal, nonprofit resources (Levine 2001x). Faced
with these problems, they will join a constituency for the cyber-commons.

CONCLUSION

The fact that the Internet can work as a commons
hardly guarantees that American democracy will flourish. It is not clear that
even a vibrant commons could serve the functions of political mobilization and
socialization that ordinary people need before they can influence public
policy. Nor will the Internet necessarily operate as a commons; in
fact, the odds favor an increasingly privatized and commercialized cyberspace.
Nevertheless, one of the most promising strategies for democratic renewal today
is to try to keep the Internet a publicly accessible space in which citizens
create and share free public goods.

References (not guaranteed to be
precisely the same as in published version)

US Census, 2000a. Voting and
Registration in the Election of November 1998 (available at <
www.census.gov/prod/2000pubs/p20-523.pdf>.)

U.S. Census Bureau 2000b. Falling Through the Net, Toward Digital
Inclusion. For the National Telecommunications and Information
Administration (NTIA), available at
<www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/digitaldivide/index.html>.

Van
Alstyne, Marshall, and Erik Brynjolfssin. 1997. “Electronic Communities: Global
Village or Cyberbalkans? available at
<web.mit.edu/marshall/www/papers/CyberBalkans.pdf.>